The OpenPolitics Project

The world is full of good ideas, and our democracies should be able to take advantage of them
wherever they come from. We are creating a democratic platform that allows
anyone with a web browser to share their ideas and build a vision together.
We started out writing a party-independent political manifesto, but now the tool
we've built to run it is available for anyone to use for their own project.

The Manifesto

The OpenPolitics Manifesto is a party-independent political manifesto
for the UK that anyone can contribute to.

The process is simple, and as open as we can make it. People with ideas can just press
the suggest button, make their change directly, and get it voted on.
If their proposal is accepted, they get to vote on future changes.

The document has been put in the public
domain, meaning that any party or candidate could adopt it.
Something New is a UK party
formed specifically to promote the manifesto, but does not exclusively
own it.

The Software

The manifesto is run by a software platform called Votebot.
It provides a friendly user interface for editing, voting, and discussion,
usable by anyone with a web browser. You can see it in action by looking
at the current manifesto
proposals.

The system is user-friendly, but underneath it uses git
and GitHub to track changes and proposals (using pull requests).

The Votebot code is open source, can be fully deployed using free
services, and can be easily re-branded. See the repository README for all the details.